“There would have been no hesitancy”: The movie Bryce Dallas Howard fought for that she came to regret
Bryce Dallas Howard knows that hindsight is 20/20 when it comes to exciting roles that seem perfect on paper.
Although any nepo babies will end up facing an undue amount of criticism for entertaining their parents’ line of work, Howard had the talent to back up her endeavour. Being the child of an Academy Award-winning director certainly gave her advantages, but her breakthrough performance in 2004 with M Night Shyamalan’s The Village was enough to suggest that she was the real deal.
What’s often more important than choosing great roles is being involved with talented people; for an actress like Howard who wanted to be taken seriously, the opportunity to appear in The Help was an exciting one. Based on the popular novel of the same name, it told the story of a Southern girl in 1960s Mississippi who decides to write a book about the community’s African-American maids. The film’s stacked ensemble included a number of brilliant actresses, including Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Alison Janney, Jessica Chastain, Sissy Spacek, Mary Steenburgen, and Anna Camp.
Howard’s role in the film as Hilly, the most insensitive member of the close-knit community, was a challenging part that she said she was determined to read for.
“After I auditioned, I thankfully heard pretty soon that I was being invited into the movie,” she said, “Then, I read the book from there. So, I wanted to do it, and then after being offered it and reading the book, there was just no way that I wouldn’t have wanted to be a part of it. Even if I hadn’t read the book, there would have been no hesitancy. It was such a fantastic screenplay.”
The Help was a major hit in 2011 and scored several key award nominations, with Howard a part of the cast that earned the ‘Best Ensemble in a Motion Picture’ prize at the Sag Awards, and the film ended up earning four Academy Award nominations, including ‘Best Picture’. Spencer won the ‘Best Supporting Actress’ trophy, and just the fact that an adult-skewing historical drama was able to make over $200million at the global box office was seen as a major breakthrough, but in the next few years, it began to attract more criticism.
Even if The Help had been intended to shine a light on the valiant efforts of African-American women who weren’t appreciated, both the film and the novel that it was based on are told entirely from the perspective of a white character. As Hollywood has continued to wrestle with its means of representation, many of the stars of the film, including Howard, stated that they regretted appearing in the film.
She can’t be blamed for her performance, which certainly showed the nasty side of the society of women who masked their racism under the excuse of tradition, but being involved in such a poorly-aged project may have been part of the reason that Howard experienced such a sudden shift in her career.
It was through directing a series of episodes of The Mandalorian for Disney+ that she found herself to be a talented filmmaker, leading her to continue working behind the camera, and given who she has in her life to take advice from, it seems like she has a much brighter future as a director than as an actor.
